


Tetraptych

by MementoVivere



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Exes, F/F, F/M, Family Headcanons, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Lots of Mando'a, Mando'a, Mentions of trafficking, One Night Stands, also you will pry my Ahsoka-Tano-adopting-a-bunch-of-war-orphans headcanon from my cold dead hands, and Sabine is a badass but she's also a sixteen-year-old you feel me, but you don't need to understand it to understand the story, double standards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 02:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5230604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MementoVivere/pseuds/MementoVivere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sabine can sort her past romances by color.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tetraptych

**Author's Note:**

> This story started over a month ago from this post: http://gondalsqueen.tumblr.com/post/130179156402/headcanon-that-i-havent-been-able-to-use-except  
> From there, I proceeded to work on it constantly but at a glacial pace, until I realized that the actual Sabine backstory episode was just around the corner and I had to get this published before it got jossed. I don't watch the little previews because they're too spoilery, so maybe it's been jossed already. Don't tell me. I don't wanna know.

**Tetraptych:** an arrangement of pictures in four parts (as for an altarpiece.)

 

* * *

  

 _i. red_  

When Sabine Wren arrives at the Imperial Academy, in a standard-issue blazer and two brown braids, she is thirteen years old and dreaming of glory. Every year she sees the older children of her clan return with insignia and blasters and _stories_ , stories of piloting walkers and setting Academy records and realizing what it means to be a soldier, and she wants that. She wants that swagger, that sense of _being_ someone, and she knows that this is where she gets it.

 Which is why, when she looks around her new dormitory, she wonders if there’s been some mistake. This isn’t a place where you find yourself. The whole building is an austere, lifeless _tomb_. Even the staff seem to have a faint gray coloring. How, Sabine wonders, do they expect anyone to live here?

Then the door bangs open and color returns.

 

Her name is Ariadne. She comes from offworld, can swear in multiple languages, and has fiery red hair and a laugh like an explosion.

Sabine falls in love instantly.

Oh, she’s had crushes before, thought a schoolmate was more beautiful than any angel or that an older clan member was brilliant enough to solve any problem in the universe. But Ariadne is _wild_ , an unstoppable force, fighting the _dullness_ choking the Academy with every step she takes.

She is also a terrible cadet. No one is certain if Ariadne herself is aware of it, but it’s clear to everyone else that the Imperial Academy is not the place for a girl with a spitfire attitude, a loud voice, and a desire to be individual, a girl who can pin her hair under a cap in the morning and by noon lose most of the pins and be halfway to losing the cap as well. No matter how hard she tries, or how much trouble she gets into, she doesn’t blend in.

The thing is, neither does Sabine.

At any given moment, at least one of them will be serving some sort of punishment, and more often than not they are together, running laps side-by-side or washing dishes together in the mess hall or scrubbing floors on hands and knees as they discuss the explosion or uniform violation or argument with an instructor that earned them disciplinary action.

She realizes that they have become a team one day when Ariadne flicks her with a grimy dishtowel and tells her to call her Ari.

 “We’re friends, aren’t we?” she says, and Sabine is surprised at how happy this makes her when she prides herself on being independent.

 

It is Ari who teaches her to like the biting flavor of caf and to line her eyes in black pencil, and it is Ari who tells her stories late at night of travelling from planet to planet, switching times and climates and cultures, of Trammistan chocolate in the Outer Rim and the Festival of Stars on Coruscant; in return, Sabine tells her about Mandalore, about the Clan Wars and the _Kyr’tsad_ and the _Resol’nare_. They sneak onto the roof at night and point out stars and planets to each other–planets Ari has visited with her father; planets Sabine hopes to see when she gets her assignment one day.

They fall asleep one night sharing a pair of earpieces to listen to the Core Drive recording that Ari’s father sent her. When Sabine wakes up, she is tangled in cords and thin Academy-issue bedsheets, and her roommate is leaning over her on all fours.

 “Ari?” she mumbles.

“Ssshhh,” says Ari, leaning down, and Sabine is too groggy to realize what’s happening until her roommate is kissing her and suddenly she’s not so sleepy anymore.

By the time she realizes that she should probably kiss back, Ari has already pulled away. In the dark, it’s hard to make out her facial expression, to guess how she feels about what she’s just done. But Sabine can still feel the blood in her ears, can still faintly taste the other girl’s lip salve, and this makes her brave enough to sit up and kiss Ari again. 

 

Their lives continue like this for some time, kissing quietly late at night, legs wrapped together and fingers tangled in each other’s hair, before it becomes unsatisfying. Both of them want _more_ , and neither of them is sure what _more_ is. Dates? Sex? The simple freedom to call the other _my girlfriend?_  

Without understanding what they want, and terrified of losing what they already have, Sabine and Ari become more daring. They start to share a bed, sleeping curled around each other. They find opportunities to sneak away during the day, between classes or while they are serving punishments. Miraculously, they are scheduled for security patrol at the same time, so it’s easy for one to pull the other into a closet or restroom and push her against the wall.

They are careless. They are clumsy. They are teenagers; they thrive on danger. _It’s not like we’re flaunting it_ , they rationalize.

What they _are_ doing, however, is making only a token effort to conceal their activities, which is how one day starts in an empty hallway with a long kiss and ends in hard plasteel chairs as as a gray-faced commandant with a grainy security holo lectures them about “professional behavior among cadets” and the “importance of exhibiting proper self-control.”

“The Emperor frowns upon such activities among his troops,” he says. Sabine wants to point out that no one cared when male cadets were asking her if she’d like to see their power packs or other such clumsy innuendo, but as loath to admit it as she is, she is afraid. Dreadfully dull as the Academy may be, she has waited most of her life to be a cadet. The possibility that a careless mistake might ruin everything is almost too awful to think about. She can’t lose everything because of one girl, she just can’t.

Ariadne Kyros is gone the next day and rumors fly—that she was expelled, that her offworld father pulled her out of the school, that she dropped out in shame, even that she was arrested. Sabine refuses to confirm or deny anyone’s theories and remains secretive about anything that happened in their meeting with the commandant—or in the past ten months at school—but this only adds fuel to the fire. By the end of the week, she has been in at least four fights, received an exceedingly embarrassing congratulatory message from her oldest sister, and been reassigned “for the foreseeable future” to assist at the facility in Tokursh.

 

 

_ii. gray_

Clan Wren is large—many families, spread all over Mandalore—so when Sabine is told that she will be working with a second Cadet Wren, she thinks nothing of it until she meets him in person.

She remembers Cyris as an energetic little boy who had headbutted her more than once and caught insects in jars (and in one memorable occurrence, his mother’s helmet), and while Sabine can understand logically that they were the same age and he had not ceased to grow when he moved away, she still can’t believe that the little boy with the bugs is the same person as the lanky blond Imperial shaking her hand.

He doesn’t ask why she’s in Tokursh instead of Keldabe, and for that Sabine is grateful. She has never been _ashamed_ , even when everyone in the Academy was speculating, but if she had to look a childhood friend in the eye and explain to him exactly why she had been reassigned, she might be able to guess what it feels like. Luckily, she is able to start over instead.

She wants to forget that the whole affair at the Keldabe Imperial Academy even happened.

So when Cyris starts to sit a little too close, to watch her when he thinks she’s not looking and hold eye contact for too long when she is, she pretends at first that she doesn’t notice. Even if she felt that way about him, romance is dangerous. Maybe, just maybe, ignoring it will make it go away.

 

Tokursh is a million times more exhausting than the Keldabe Academy. Sabine would like to think that it’s because she’s doing real jobs instead of training, or that it’s because she’s surrounded by adult officers instead of people her age, or even that it’s simply the atmosphere—anything but the truth, which is that she’s felt like she was running every moment since she arrived. Without telling a single lie, somehow she has managed to conceal her past like a knot in a quilt, smoothing it over until no one cares.

Concealment takes its toll on her. Every day, the person she knows she is withers a little more in favor of the person she has allowed the men around her to think she is. She stops sassing the officers. She pins her hair under her cap. She lets Cyris put his arm around her and is shocked to realize that it feels nice.

 _It’s not like I’m doing such a great job holding myself together_ , she thinks. _Might as well have someone do it for me_.

What’s scary is that she _knows_ this isn’t her, that these aren’t her words. But here they are, in her brain, as if they’ve always been a part of her.

Her world has started to fade at the edges.

 

When the world is muted and turning gray, the sharp contrast of black and white seems like a relief at first.

The first time Cyris kisses her, there isn’t any feeling of _rightness_ , of triumph, like there was before. It’s not an _experience_. It is not wonderful. It is not terrible, either. It is simply something that is happening.

But it’s something to focus on. Something other than how Sabine doesn’t feel like herself anymore, just some nameless, faceless, _colorless_ cadet working in a mining facility. It’s distracting, and it’s simple, and it’s nice.

At fourteen years old, Sabine Wren is more than ready for _something_ in her life to be easy, and if that thing is Cyris romancing her, so be it.

  

She’s not sure when, exactly, she realized what was happening at the mines. Perhaps it was gradual, perhaps it came to her in a dream, perhaps she’s known all along and only now allows herself to acknowledge it as she watches the shock hit the miners. Their bodies convulse as the electricity dances through their bodies and against their skin. 

 _They’re slaves_.

She will never admit this, but she might have been able to ignore this realization. She might have been able to walk back into the base and receive her next assignment, force the slaves out of her mind, until she hears one of them speak.

“ _Ge’hutuun_ ,” he hisses, and the foreman sends another jolt of electricity through the slave’s body until he goes limp.

Sabine feels sick. These people can’t be Mando’ade, they _can’t._ Mandalore is loyal, Mandalore is obedient, they have given the Empire land and resources and soldiers. They have done nothing to warrant being forced into slave labor. _And yet here they are._

She dreams of her clanmates shaking on the ground that night, of their faces contorting in agony and their bones lit blue by electric currents.

The next day, Cyris asks her if she’s all right. She’s acting strange, he says, sliding an arm around her—is she ill? Homesick? Overworked?

Sabine doesn’t answer. Instead, she lets him kiss her over and over until she’s not thinking of her dream or the slaves or home or of anything at all.

She knows that she doesn’t love him. But she doesn’t need love right now. She just needs to forget.

 

It’s in trying to forget that she finds herself again. The bottles and cans of paint so carefully hidden in boxes beneath her bed are dusty when she pulls them out, but she shakes them and they still feel good and solid in her hand, she opens them and the smell is comforting. She starts on flimsiplast, trying to force the pictures out of her head and put them on her art pads instead, but soon she’s pulling a million identical white and gray blazers out of her closet to cover its walls with secret pictures and designs and _color_.

The nightmares don’t stop. She sees her friends in prisoners’ binders, her sisters as dead-eyed field whores, her little brother coughing up lungfuls of dust as a mine collapses over him and the overseers do nothing. Her dreams invent horrors beyond any she could have come up with awake.

One night, she dreams of Ariadne, kneeling at her feet in tears. Sabine can feel the shock whip in her hand, but there is nothing she can do to stop herself, trapped in her own body as she brings down the weapon on Ariadne’s spine over and over. She can still hear the screaming when she wakes up; it’s not something that she could get out on the walls of her closet. She could paint her whole room, the whole _building_ , and she would still have Ariadne’s screams in her ears.

There’s only one thing that she can think of to do.

It would be hard to explain, but the likelihood of anyone entering her quarters at two in the morning is small, and she’s not sure she cares anyway. So in the dark Imperial base, a crying cadet is painting swirls and splatters up her arms, across her collar, down her sides, covering her body in colors and shapes until the tears stop.

She isn’t sure how long she spends like this, only that when she finishes she looks at the window and sees her reflection staring back at her with wet eyes, naked and covered in paint.

Behind her reflection is the mining camp. It’s difficult to see in the dark, but she knows what it looks like, and in that moment it’s painfully clear that the girl with colors all over her body doesn’t belong there.

  

On the night she runs away, she leaves a final “fuck you” to the people of the Tokursh base—to the Empire as an institution—in the form of the brightest paint she has and a handful of detonators stolen from the armory. Her “present” won’t go off until the morning, but when it does, it will be a sight to see. Sabine rounds the corner after setting her last detonator and comes face-to-face with Cyris.

“What are you doing?” she asks before she can stop herself.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he says. “Went for a walk.”

They stare at each other.

“You’re running away,” he adds, and Sabine wonders how obvious she must have been. “Going AWOL. Aren’t you?”

She clenches her hands into fists, trying to think of a way out. Cyris isn’t that much larger than she is. She could probably knock him out. Shooting him would attract too much attention, and she’s not sure if she could bring herself to kill a clanmate, anyway.

 _There’s a first time for everything…_ __

She’s ready for a fight when Cyris holds up his hands. “Don’t tell me. If you tell me, I have to tell them.” He smiles the same smile she remembers from nine years ago over a jar of myrmins.  “If I suddenly decide that I’m done with my walk and go back to my quarters, though…”

“Why?” she asks. “Not that I’m complaining, but…why?”

“You’re my clan,” he says. “You’d do the same for me. _Aliit ori’shya tal’din_.”

 _Family is more than blood._ __

There’s another phrase that might provide a more suitable explanation; the fact that he chose this one instead tells her that he _knows._ __

“The security cam in the southwest bay is broken,” he adds after a moment of silence. “You’ll want to leave from there.”

“I’m sorry,” says Sabine, but she isn’t sure exactly what she’s sorry for.

 

 _iii. pink_  

“That girl over there keeps looking at you.”

They’ve been having variations of this conversation ever since Hera got it into her head weeks ago that Sabine needed to go out in public and meet people. She thinks it’s not good for her to spend her entire life on one ship with the same four crewmembers as her only company. Sabine, meanwhile, thinks Hera is too idealistic for her own good, or for anyone’s good. She doesn’t understand where idealism will get you.

Sabine knows where it got her: a life as an army deserter, probably outcast from her clan, who ruins the life of anyone she dares to get close to. She swore when she left the Academy that she was through listening to what anyone else thought, but it is difficult to rationalize disobeying someone without whom you would either be in prison or on the streets. So she cooperates.

“You should go talk to her,” Hera continues, sounding pleased with herself.

Sabine rolls her eyes. “Isn’t it enough that I followed you out here?”

She knows that the answer is no. It’s true that she volunteered to accompany Hera to meet their contact on Acheron, but that was mostly in order to test her insistence that Sabine “go places and meet people.” Surely she wouldn’t be willing to take her young ward into a rough-as-a-strill’s-backside bar to meet some mystery contact, would she?

Apparently she would, if it would serve her greater, more annoying goal. Sabine really should have known better.

“Nope. I saw you watching her earlier, _go talk to her_ ,” says Hera again. She raises an eyebrow, staring at Sabine as one would a misbehaving child. To be honest, Sabine is beginning to feel like one, and that makes her even angrier than Hera’s attempts at playing matchmaker.  She may rely on Hera and her crew, but she does this out of necessity. It’s a practical arrangement; she helps them on their mercy missions and does mechanic work, and they give her a home and protection from the Empire.

But Hera isn’t her _mother_. She’s her captain, that’s _it_. (Her real mother is probably in prison, maybe even dead. Sabine has been searching for her family, but all that she’s found is records of her older sisters being fired after her “sabotage” put her whole family under suspicion, so she is beginning to suspect the worst.) And the captain does not need to know all of the squishy, personal information about the soldiers under her command. Sabine isn’t _hiding_ anything, she just doesn’t feel that Hera, or anyone else, needs to know any more than they already do. If it is important, it will come up.

Clearly, they already know more than she thought.

She _was_ watching the pretty Zeltron girl, but that was the part of her that’s Sabine-the- _person_ , not Sabine-the-soldier. That’s the part of her that belongs _only_ to her—the squishy, useless, human part. What right does Hera have to it? What good could it do?

“I’m not going to do that,” she says, scowling into her cup. “I— _ow._ ”

Hera has grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into a standing position. “Captain’s orders,” she says. “You have to. Sorry.”

She pushes Sabine towards the girl, not seeming sorry at all.

  

“I was wondering if you were going to come say hello,” says the girl, her voice raised over the music. “I’m Ziva, and you are?”

“Sabine,” says Sabine.

Ziva’s smile gets bigger, revealing a smudge of violet lipstick on her otherwise bright white teeth. “A beautiful name for a gorgeous girl,” she says. Crosses her legs. “Well, Sabine, are you going to sit down?”

Okay, so she doesn’t do _subtle_. That’s okay, Sabine isn’t a fan of subtlety either. On Tokursh, the smoking, little-girl-pink remains of the walkers and the words “I FUCKING QUIT” on the docking bay entrance can attest to that. But this is…different.

Although Ziva is indeed pink.

Sabine sits, taking off her gloves just to have something to do. This really, really isn’t her area. How did she let Hera talk her into this? Is she falling back into submission that quickly?

No, that’s stupid. As annoying as it is, “talk to a girl because I say so” is not the same thing as “stand by and watch your people be killed and enslaved because I say so.” She shouldn’t even be _thinking_ that.

She _is_ , though. Is this a test? A sign of things to come? What would she do if Hera told her to kill someone in cold blood? After a few months under her command, it’s not entirely implausible. There isn’t a force in existence that can reckon with Hera’s will. The woman would Base Delta Zero her own homeworld to achieve her goals.

“Hey, you still there?”

“Yeah,” Sabine says, shaking her head. “Yeah, I just…” This was a bad idea. This was a bad, bad, bad idea. Hera was wrong. She should not have tried this. She should just walk away now.

She is halfway out of her seat when she sees Hera scowling at her across the bar. _Speak of the devil._ An almost imperceptible shake of the head and an angry _twitch_ has Sabine right back in her chair again, Ziva staring at her quizzically.

 _Not a force in existence._ __

A pink hand comes to rest on her forearm. “Is something wrong? If I’m bothering you, you can tell me.” Ziva’s words sound slightly muffled; when Sabine looks back at her, she can see that the other girl is biting her lip. It occurs to her that this is probably where the smudge came from.

“Nothing.” _This isn’t bad_ , she tells herself, pulling her gloves back on. _This isn’t bad at all. I’m talking to a pretty girl and she actually seems interested. There are plenty of intelligent beings who would kill to be me right now._ “I was gonna get another drink, but then I thought I’d ask if you want something.”

“You’ll regret _that,_ ” Ziva says as she stands up, pulling Sabine back up with her. “I can drink a _lot,_ my dear.”

 

What happens after that is a little fuzzy. Somehow, Sabine finds herself outdoors, backed up against a permacrete wall, feeling lightning underneath her skin as Ziva kisses her _again_ and _again_ and _again_.

When they finally pull apart, she reaches for a lock of Ziva’s hair, twirling it between her fingers. “Your hair is beautiful,” she whispers. She couldn’t see it in the dimly-lit bar, but under the streetlights and the neon bar sign, it is a work of art, lavender fading into pale blue. Sabine knows the word for this, _knows_ that she knows, but she can’t find it, lost in her head after the shuura tihaar.

Ziva laughs. “I could do yours for you if you’d like,” she says, tugging at the blunt ends of Sabine’s hair. “You wanna do that? I’ll take you back to my place.”

And she kisses her yet again.

 

After Sabine left the Academy, she cut of all of her hair in a cold hostel bathroom. It’s short and jagged now, longer in the back where she couldn’t see what she was doing, shorter in the front where she could. She might have cried when she did it. She isn’t sure. It was not very complicated, that she knows: braiding her hair and sawing off the braid with a stolen vibroblade, little dark tufts drifting down into the sink. Simple.

Unlike now, when her neck aches from bending back so far and her legs kill from kneeling as Ziva scrubs the bleach from her hair and replaces it with a bloody-looking mixture from a bottle.

“I bought this for me,” Ziva says, her voice distorted by the running water, “but it came out too close to my skin color, so I never used it again. I looked awful.”

“Very reassuring!” Sabine shouts, slightly dizzy from the chemical smell.

“Oh, hush,” says Ziva. She turns off the water. “Stand up.”

Sabine does, and the blood rushes out of her head, her vision going black for a moment.

“You’ve gotta let it sit a while,” Ziva is saying when sight and hearing return. “Let it soak in. _So…_ ”

She reaches for Sabine.

 _Lightning_. 

When Sabine wakes up the next morning, she is in an unfamiliar bed, her hair is a dark pink, and her legs are tangled around Ziva’s. The other girl is still asleep, hair spread out around her head like a halo. _Ombre_ , Sabine thinks, _that’s the word I was looking for_.

She should wake Ziva, should put her clothes back on and head back to the _Ghost_. She _should_ , but she won’t.

For now, she’s going to go back to sleep, because for the first time in a while, she feels like _herself_ , and she’s going to enjoy it.

Hera can _never_ know this.

 

_iv. red again_

The first time Sabine fell in love was at the Imperial Academy. The second time she falls in love is after officially joining the Rebellion, and she thinks it’s kind of funny how that worked out.

Not long after the _Ghost_ crew first meets the other rebels, when they’re still getting used to the idea of other cells and to calling Fulcrum _Ahsoka_ , they are in a briefing with Commander Sato when a teenage girl with a red scarf tied under her chin hurries into the room. She whispers something to Ahsoka, who grimaces and whispers something back. The girl nods and leaves, and she is largely forgotten about as the conversation returns to the Middle Rim refugees.

Sabine watches her go.

  

It isn’t until later that they actually meet, and when they do it’s entirely by accident. It’s been too long without something to _do_ , supplies to recover or information to gather or stormtroopers to give a beatdown. Sabine is restless, exploring the blockade runner for lack of anything better to do.

She turns a corner and finds the girl from the briefing room, dancing in the middle of an empty hall with her eyes shut. Her scarf is pulled down around her neck, letting her hair fly.

She is wearing the same loose gray tunic as before, and at the time Sabine had thought that it made her look like an Imperial, this pale, spindly girl lacking any color apart from the red scarf. Not now, not at all. No Imp ever looked as _alive_ as this girl does, dancing barefoot in the hallway with no music. She is alive, and beautiful, and _real_.

The dancer turns around, eyes slightly opening. When she sees Sabine watching her, her eyes widen and she stops cold.

“ _Osi’kyr!”_ she hisses.

Sabine blinks. “ _Tion gar jorhaa’ir Mando’a_?”

The girl opens her mouth, then shuts it again. “A little,” she says in Basic, eyes on the ground. “Mostly curses.”

The words are tumbling out of Sabine’s mouth before she can stop them, question where they are coming from. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in learning more, would you?”

She regrets it as soon as she’s finished speaking. _Watch yourself, soldier._ That can’t happen again. This is _war_ now, after all; you can’t just stop using your head because some pretty girl flips her hair at you.

“ _And knows Mando’a_ ,” adds an annoying little voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Hera.

 _Shut up, Hera_.

“I am sorry?”

 _Haar’chak_. She said that out loud.

“So you’re one of Ful—Ahsoka’s people?” Sabine asks quickly. Maybe the new question will be a sufficient distraction.

“You could say that,” says the girl. “She rescued me when I was a child. There are several of us. And you are with Captain Syndulla, is that right?”

“Yeah,” says Sabine, grinning. “Hera.”

The girl smiles back. “Your cell has done much for us,” she says. “We are very lucky to have you.”

Sabine glances away, pushing her bangs out of her eyes and feeling more self-conscious than she has for a long time. “Don’t you run missions too?”

“No. We spend most of our time here, working with the fleet,” says the girl. “But one day, when everything is right again, I would like to travel and see the galaxy.” Her eyes are shining, the way that Hera’s do when she talks about flying, the way Sabine is sure she looks after one of her bombs has gone off. The joy this girl clearly feels from just _thinking_ about her dream is contagious.

 _Just look at her._ __

“There are lots of cells out there,” Sabine says. “If you want to get out there so bad, couldn’t you join up with one of them?”

“My…my friends and I used to be much like yours, actually,” says the girl. “But some of them were not subtle. Now too many are wanted by the Empire. Ahsoka says we draw too much attention to ourselves. She keeps us close these days.”

That doesn’t _sound_ like Ahsoka. “What do you mean?”

“I believe her exact words were _I don’t want your names out there._ ”

 _Oh, stupid! Stupid! You don’t even know her_ name _!_

“So what _is_ your name? I don’t think I ever asked you.”

“Kara.”

 _Kara_. “That’s perfect,” Sabine blurts, forgetting once again to think _first_ and talk _second_.

“What is?” says Kara, looking understandably confused.

“Your name. It’s—we have a legend back home. _Ka’ra_ means the stars, and it’s where… leaders who die in battle look out for us. Kinda like you, watching everything from here. And you did say that you wanted to see the galaxy.” _And because you’re just as fascinating as the stars must have been to those first explorers in the Core Worlds and if I touch you I’ll probably be burned and when did I become such a useless_ idiot?

“That is beautiful,” says Kara. “I am flattered.”

It’s silent after that, and Sabine wonders if she’s screwed up. _This_ , this is why talking to people isn’t worth it, no matter what Hera thinks. She is desperately combing her brain for _something_ else to say when Kara speaks again.

“I would very much like to learn your Mando’a, if you would teach me,” she says at last. Her face is rather pink.

 _Oh, wow, she’s perfect,_ says the unhelpful voice in Sabine’s head, and although _perfect_ may not be the right word, she can feel the last of her resolve begin to die.

 _Okay! Okay, I like this girl, are you happy now?_ __

 It’s a good thing that Hera isn’t _really_ here, because Sabine can imagine the look on her face already. 

 

They start with quick lessons in hallways, during small windows of time when neither of them has to be elsewhere. Sabine makes vocabulary lists on the back of used flimsiplast and gives them to Kara to practice. There’s no need to start with curses—Kara knows most of those already—but Sabine teaches her some of the more creative insults, and feels a little thrill the first time she hears her grumbling “ _Kaysh mirsh solus!_ ” after an argument with one of the soldiers. She’s unsure when, exactly, it becomes a bonding experience, only that she finds herself looking forward to sitting in a storage room, watching Kara stick out her jaw as she tries to remember the word that she _really does know_.

        “Why did you want to learn Mando’a?” she asks Kara one day. They are in the food storage, leaning against a crate of MREs.

        “I would like to learn all of the languages I can,” says Kara. “I could not communicate once before. I do not want that to happen again.”

        “What do you mean?”

        “When I was a little girl,” Kara says, “Ahsoka Tano saved me from being a slave to the Empire.”

 _Shock collars. Beskar mines. All those nightmares._ __

“I stayed with her after that,” she continues. “I did not have anywhere else to go.”

Sabine nods. _Go on._ __

“I spoke very little Basic,” Kara says, twisting the scarf in her lap. “I barely understood them. I could not speak to them. Do you know Luria? For many months, Luria had to speak for me.”

She does know Luria—a small, delicate Twi’lek girl, another one of Ahsoka’s war orphans, around eleven years old. She would have been even younger when she acted as Kara’s translator.

“I love her very much,” says Kara, “but to have to communicate through someone half your age, to rely on them in every situation—I never wanted to experience that again.” 

 

That night, Sabine sits in her bunk with a sketchpad and draws a little girl in a gray dress and red scarf. Her feet are bare. Her mouth is sewn shut.

Something is missing, and Sabine is unsure what it is until the figure is already taking shape on the pad—another little girl, with long dark pigtails and an Imperial Academy blazer hanging off of slumped shoulders.

The two girls glare at each other, one daring anyone to pity her, the other begging someone to listen.

  

They’ve invented a sort of game, the kind that springs into existence without being discussed. It’s nothing special—more of a teaching tool than a game, really—but they enjoy it regardless.

 _“Gai?”_ asks Sabine— _name?_ —and pats the blasters on either side of her hips.

 “Besbe’tray—“ Kara stumbles, blows through her lips. _“Besbe’trayce.”_

 _“Gar serim,”_ says Sabine, nodding. She points at the viewpoint, where the mottled blue of hyperspace rushes past. _“Gai?”_ __

 _“Tra,”_ says Kara.

“ _Serim. Gai?”_ Sabine gestures at an astromech rolling down the hall.

 _“Beskar’ad.”_ __

_“Serim. Gai?”_ She pulls off one of her gloves and tosses it at Kara, meaning for the other girl to catch it. Instead, Kara’s arms fly up to cover her face, and she lets out a cry completely disproportionate to having a glove thrown at her.

Sabine freezes.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” says Kara. “I didn’t mean to do that, I’m sorry.” Her voice is rising, becoming more and more anxious, and Sabine makes a mental note to ask Ahsoka _where Kara came from_.

“Hey, it’s okay,” she says, reaching with caution to pull Kara’s hands away from her face. “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry. Hey.” She squeezes Kara’s hands, and Kara blinks at her.

“ _Gai?”_ she asks, squeezing back with trembling hands.

 _“Gaan,”_ says Sabine, as evenly as possible.

“Gawn?”

 _“Gaan.”_ __

Kara nods and moves closer, reaching over to touch Sabine’s hair. _“Gai?”_

 _“Gemas,”_ Sabine says, smiling.

 _“Gemas,”_ Kara repeats. Her hand trails down the side of Sabine’s face and comes to a rest on her cheek. Sabine can feel the tremor still in the hand, and if anyone asks, she’ll say that she lay her own hand over Kara’s to steady it. Not that that’s much better of an excuse.  _“Gai?”_ __

 _“Troan,”_ she says, and then Kara’s forehead is pressed against hers and she’s _so, so close_ , and that’s when Sabine gets an idea. Tomorrow, she will think this idea was as stupid as anything, but at the moment all that she can think is that she wants this Rebel girl more than she wants just about anything right now.

 _“Mureyca,”_ she whispers, and kisses her.

She half expects Kara to pull away, to force her to pretend nothing ever happened. Instead, she finds herself clutched by the hair and pulled closer.

Kara’s kiss is not as graceful as her dance; it’s rough and hints at inexperience. Sabine doesn’t care. She wraps her arm around the other girl’s waist, sitting down hard on a crate and pulling Kara with her.

If the ship were attacked, if it flew into a star, if the galaxy itself collapsed, it wouldn’t matter, not right now.

Not right now, when finally, _finally_ , everything feels _right_.


End file.
